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Economics and literary criticism are far from mutually uncomprehending strangers.

by PAUL CROSTHWAITE

In David Lodge's 1988 campus novel Nice Work, the protagonist, Robyn, comes across her literary theorist boyfriend, Charles, reading a book that appears, on the face of it, to be a far cry from his usual fare of Derrida and Lacan. Spotting the title, The Financial Revolution Robyn expresses surprise that Charles "could ever get interested in business." He replies: "This isn't business … It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon—arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rate. It’s like literary theory”. Charles is planning “an article about what’s going on in the City”; later, he will succumb to the lure of London’s financial district and take a job as a strategist at an investment bank.

A “literarity-inflected” sensibility might be well placed to offer some genuine analytical traction on the world of finance.

Lodge’s novel points, then, to a certain—all-too-ready—affinity between the practice and rhetoric of high finance and the theoretical discourses central to the study of literature. In positing the “seductiveness” of finance for the literary theorist, Nice Work anticipates recent critiques by the likes of Joshua Clover and Annie McClanahan (themselves literary critics and, in Clover’s case, a poet) of what Clover calls “literarity-inflected economics." For Clover, McClanahan, and others, approaches to contemporary finance informed by the concerns of literary studies are liable merely to reproduce the ideology of their object of study, rhapsodizing over the weightlessness, opacity, and abstraction of a new “economy of signs,” and occluding the resolutely material processes that continue to underlie the financial system and place limits on its expansion.

Let me begin with a few remarks concerning the figure of Eric Packer in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. In a certain way, he is not only an allegory of contemporary finance capitalism but also the fallen angel of an illusion—of the illusion that markets and especially financial markets tend towards equilibrium, that they assure perfect allocation and the best distribution of information, that they finally create a sort of social order. This illusion represents the kernel of liberal market theories from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” up to the present and still characterizes what economists have named the “efficient market hypothesis.”

This theory—which has been developed since the 1970s and became dominant or hegemonic in the knowledge of financial markets—holds (to put it very briefly) that it is financial markets which depict market activity in their most beautiful purity. Unburdened by transaction costs, unencumbered by transport and by the tribulations of production, they are the ideal stages for pricing mechanisms and perfect competition.

The magical thinking of economists is a pathology of thought with deep historical roots.

by MIKE HILL & WARREN MONTAG

God's hand from "The Creation of Adam," Michelangelo's world famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

To apply the term “magical” to modern economic thought is to suggest that, despite the extensive formalization of the discipline, above all, its use of econometric models to analyze its data, there remains within it an unassimilated and unexamined residue of irrational thought. Moreover, the irrationality is most evident in its basic assumptions: not only the assumptions about human action, but even more about what is increasingly acknowledged to be the theoretical Achilles heel of economics since its inception in the eighteenth century, the concept of the market itself. It is here that the term “magical,” which allowed us to see the irrationality that is reproduced rather than eliminated by its formal apparatus, may, if we’re not careful, prevent us from seeing how the magical thinking of economists is not simply a pathology of thought, but is historically determined in ways that are so profoundly embedded in economic theory that they have proven to be remarkably resistant to analysis.

The theological underpinnings of economic theory are becoming increasingly obvious.

The physiocrats saw the market as a “second providence,” an extension of God’s design (with or without God) through the unintended consequences of human activity. As Martijn Konings has noted, later critics of this idea saw it as a kind of idolatry: the market could be granted autonomous agency and knowledge only on the basis of a forgetting and a repression of the fact that it was a product of and dependent on human activity. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein explores the fear that such an idol inspires: the idea that a mute and unmoving Golden Calf could become a Golem, that is, come alive, free itself from human control, and destroy its creator.

I have always been somewhat suspicious of attempts to theorize money in linguistic terms. Though the symbolic and conventional aspects of money make a parallel with language seem attractive, such attempts usually refrain from considering the consequences of the fact that money belongs to the order of private property, which is strictly opposed to the common sphere of language. Wouldn't conceiving of money as language force us to confront the abhorrent, monstrous possibility of words that can be owned?

That is the big achievement of Martijn Konings's The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, which conceptualizes money as an icon, drawing from the religious meaning of the term, as a symbol that represents through absence what cannot be represented, as well as from its place in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory, as a sign based on a similarity to what it signifies. The full significance of this attempt becomes clear in the last chapter of the book, where Konings addresses the deepest political-economic riddle of our time: the sweeping victory of neoliberalism. Given that the neoliberal order is most harmful to the material prosperity of most people, some writers tend to think it was established "from above" by an alliance of capitalists, politicians, economic think tanks, and the media. Konings confronts the mystery such explanations evade, namely, how neoliberalism was embraced by those people whose prosperity it threatens.

Since at least the nineteenth century, economists have imagined the market as a profoundly rational way of organizing society. Unlike other modes of economic organization, the market is governed by natural laws that ensure the most efficient possible allocation of resources. Modern financial economists take this logic even further, seeing new financial instruments as a means of efficiently managing risk. These visions betray a mechanical conception of economy. Like a well-oiled machine, buyers and sellers play their part in a larger whole, balancing each other out and enabling practical reason to lead societies to ever-greater levels of prosperity.

There is something irrational, something supernatural—even magical—about the way global finance operates.

In many ways the contemporary financial economy does look like a machine. Think, for example, of its Bloomberg terminals, its automated trading systems, and its algorithm wars. But if global finance is a machine, then there is something irrational, something supernatural—even magical—about the way it operates. It’s not just the periodic bouts of mania, panic, and crisis; nor is it the apparently endless drive to accumulate, to conjure more and more wealth out of a void. It’s that in these and other processes, a range of psychic investments are at work—curious attachments that bind us to money, to projected futures, to imaginary orders, and ultimately, to the modes of power upon which capitalism depends. The magical parts make and move the mechanical whole. This, at least, is the controversial idea developed in a string of new books to which this forum is dedicated.

Economics structure human society so thoroughly and so profoundly that, just as it cannot be expected to remain the sole purview of mainstream economists, it cannot but benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. The tumult of boom-and-busts, the global reach of today’s markets, the inequitable distribution of the economy’s fruits, the increasingly dizzying financial maneuvers that speculate on and simultaneously manufacture our realities, have all coalesced—along with many other pertinent questions—into an increasing demand for a more pluralistic view of this enigma we call “the economy.”

With contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, it is little wonder that the name of poet Robinson Jeffers rings far fewer bells, even in the ears of avid poetry fans. Jeffers, who was born at the twilight of the 19th century and wrote most prolifically throughout the first half of the 20th, joined an audaciously talented chorus of American poets who—then, as now—were regarded as literary celebrities and cultural icons.

Jeffers is essential to understanding ourselves, the twentieth century, and the world.

But, on April 4th, 1932 the portrait of a reclusive California-based poet named Robinson Jeffers, photographed in contemplative profile, was emblazoned on the cover of Time magazine, nine years after Amy Lowell received a similar honor, and eighteen years before T.S. Eliot would adorn its pages. With the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924, Jeffers’ fame sprung into being virtually overnight. One decade and multiple collections of poetry later, he had become arguably the most famous poet in the United States.

Despite his prominence and critical success—and the numerous literary honors he accrued notwithstanding—one poet and literary critic writing in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune asked, “Why does so much deep silence surround the name of Robinson Jeffers?”

People have long been fascinated by the creative ways that humans repurpose objects to suit their particular needs and desires. Recently, a number of artists, historians, and critics have begun to document the myriad cases of object repurposing and the impulses behind them—myself included. In The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture, I examined some of these practices as they surfaced in literature, art, and other cultural artifacts within the United States from the 1960s to the present. I spent the majority of the book outlining the strange interrelationships that arise among object repurposing, contemporary “Maker” communities such as Instructables, post-apocalyptic literature, and American left- and right-libertarian politics.

If I had to do it over again, I’d add the hit television series Project Runway, which issues an annual “unconventional challenge” asking contestants to fashion clothing out of material scrounged from a hardware store, a grocery store, or a candy store.

After residing for almost a decade in Europe, Mark Twain sailed back to the United States in October 1900. He had not only combated financial losses from his untimely investment in the Paige typesetter, but he had also made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic. The sixty-four-year-old writer had become a national hero and a celebrity figure, one whose homecoming was a much-anticipated event across the country. Newspapers lauded his success in overcoming bankruptcy and achieving fame and popularity in Europe, hailing him as “the bravest author in literature.” Harper’s Weekly heralded him as the “the most advertised man in the world.”

While in the United States, Twain is largely viewed as a humorist, in China his principal reputation is that of an anti-imperial polemicist and a cherished advocate.

While writers and reporters were expecting the humorist to delight the American audience with funny stories or the wonders of his travels, Twain took them by surprise with a decidedly pointed political declaration almost immediately after he landed; he remarked to a New York Herald reporter on October 16: “I am an anti-imperialist, I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Twain would follow up on his unequivocal verdict a month later, speaking up against the foreign occupation in Manchuria and in support of the anti-imperialist uprising in China known as the Boxer Rebellion. “I am a Boxer, too” he announced to a standing room at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York City. The following year, Twain assumed the vice presidency of the American Anti-Imperialist League, an organization which he helped found and included such prominent members as Jane Addams, Ambrose Bierce, and Andrew Carnegie; Twain served in this post until the end of his life.

Benjamin Harshav, poet, author, teacher, translator, and literary scholar, died last week, leaving behind him a remarkable legacy in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew literary scholarship. A prolific writer and editor of multiple volumes on poetry, literature, and culture, Harshav published no less than eight titles with Stanford University Press—titles that included translations, edited anthologies, and original essays. His life spanned nearly nine decades and three continents—from Eastern Europe, to Israel, to the United States. During his life he was a champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement and worked indefatigably to bring volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry to wider audiences through translation.

A champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement.

Harshav’s Yiddish roots ran deep—he was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1928, a town which he described as the “self-styled bastion of Yiddish culture.” But in 1941, the year the Germans wrested the city from Soviet control, Harshav and his family fled to the Urals, where—despite that fact that he would eventually follow a calling in literary scholarship—Harshav attended university to study math and physics.

The Manhattan Project is dedicated to the capital of the twentieth century. It doesn’t pretend to have a position on life in contemporary New York. But I can only imagine that if, a hundred years from now, someone were to take up the task of writing a similar book about New York in the twenty-first century, it would probably be titled The Brooklyn Project.

Brooklyn was designed as the first American suburb and it cannot escape its original telos.

For the past 15 years I’ve been living on the wrong side of the East River. Increasingly, Manhattan felt like a deserted island, at least as much as my milieu was concerned. I often joke that riding my bike over the bridge on the way to meet someone in Brooklyn feels like Whitman’s ferry ride in the opposite direction. As if both are trips to the truly pumping heart of the metropolitan matter.

But I never considered actually moving there. Here’s why: Brooklyn was designed as the first American suburb. Though it operates very differently from the iconic iterations of suburbia built after World War II, Brooklyn cannot escape its original telos. It has no way to become a genuine urban center. No matter how much it will be revitalized, how much capital will be pumped into its tree-lined streets, this borough can only offer its inhabitants a sub-urban experience.

We publish here a transcript of an interview with Allan Stewart Konigsberg (aka Woody Allen), conducted by Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (aka Carl Roseman), which took place in 1985. Sandor Needleman, a retired Columbia University professor who arranged the meeting and took these notes, stipulated that they should be “published posthumously or after his death, whichever comes first.”

WALTER: Most people think about Manhattan the film as your love letter to Manhattan the place. I disagree. For me it is a declaration of war. What was on your mind when you made it?

WOODY: You’re right. I said before that I wrote the script while thinking about what is happening to American culture, where relationships between human beings are becoming harder and harder to have, and it is becom­ing harder and harder to be honest and not to sell out. New York has to fight every day for its survival against the encroachment of all this terrible ugliness that is gradually overcoming all the big cities in America. This ugliness comes from a culture that has no spiritual center, a culture that has money and education but no sense of being at peace with the world, no sense of purpose in life.

Crack the spine on David Kishik’s The Manhattan Projectand one of the first things you will discover is the timeline at the book’s beginning recounting the life of German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. The chronology plods predictably enough beginning with Benjamin’s birth in 1892 and skimming through the first half of the twentieth century, during which time we see Benjamin study, marry, flounder as an academic, and begin work on his magnum opus, The Arcades Project, also known as Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.

The philosopher fakes his death and departs for New York under a pseudonym borrowed from a Kafka novel.

Around 1940, however—an ill-fated year for Benjamin—Kishik’s history veers off course, teetering into what the author describes as a counterfactual trajectory of the philosopher’s life. Benjamin’s death by suicide at the French border is reimagined as a clever ruse, in which the philosopher fakes his death and departs for New York under a pseudonym borrowed from a Kafka novel. Walter Benjamin-cum-Carl Roseman (à la Karl Rossman of Amerika) finds himself stateside, where he retreats into anonymity and begins composing a sequel to his Arcades Project. This manuscript—lost in the annals of the New York Public Library until 2008—applies the same sweeping analytical lens Benjamin applied to Paris to New York, heralding the city as the successor to Paris—capital of the twentieth century. It is this hypothetical manuscript that is Kishik’s chief object of analysis in The Manhattan Project.

The Woman Who Read Too Much is set in 19th-century Persia (now Iran) and is built in part on the life of a historical figure, the revolutionary female poets Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn. Am I right to think that you came to the idea of this novel initially through learning about her?

A:

The general outlines of this story have been familiar to me since childhood. Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn was my ideal, the “heroine” I learned about growing up in a Baha’i family; she was the first woman to embrace the revolutionary teachings of the Bab, who was the prophet herald of the Baha’i Faith. An erudite scholar, a theologian as well as a poet, Tahirih understood, from her reading of the Quran, that religion, like all other human institutions, has a life cycle; Islam was in need not merely of reform but of renewal. This belief, based on the teachings of Ali Muhammad the Bab, pitched her into a headlong battle with the clerics of her generation, a struggle that is still raging in Islamic countries today.

I learned all this from history; her ideas and her ideals are well documented. But I discovered much later, as an adult, how little I actually knew about her as a woman, how little I could trust about what people have written of her life. It was because there were so many contradictions surrounding this woman that I came to the idea of writing a novel: it was precisely in order to contain all the contradictions and the paradoxes she symbolizes, that I chose fiction.

Enter to win a signed copy of a new novel chronicling one woman's luminous legacy.

Plots. Political intrigue. Treachery. The high-handed actions of omnipotent rulers. Death by decree. That’s the world that Bahiyyih Nakhjavani plunges readers into with The Woman Who Read Too Much: Persia in the mid-nineteenth century, a society that clings to the old ways even as the world around it is rapidly transforming.

A young Shah, personally and politically weak, sits on an uncertain throne, fascinated by modernity even as he fears the Western powers that would deliver it to his nation—for a price. When a female poet, based in part on Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn, a historical personality who was also a theologian and revolutionary, dares to reject the veil and begin agitating for female literacy, her campaign shakes the very foundations of Persian society. Nakhjavani tells the story of the poet’s campaign through the eyes of the women of Iran—officially excluded from power, yet finding unexpected, subversive ways to exercise it nonetheless. Through these women, we see a society on the brink of change—and the deadly political maneuvering and violence that will accompany it.

Enter your name and email below for a chance to win one of five author signed copies of the novel which Kirkus describes as a "haunting . . . expertly crafted epic" and, in 2007, was counted among the "best three books" of the year by the Time Literary Supplement(£). Winners will be randomly selected and announced on Friday.

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